5/24/2010 @ 6:00AM

Bypassing IT Bottlenecks

Don’t get between Jay Roy and his data. For an information technology person, that’s a good way to get fired.

Roy is CEO of AWPRx, a Florida company that provides pharmacy benefits management services in workers’ compensation cases. It’s a 25-person firm with about $15 million in revenue, and it runs on data.

Roy knows he needs to have good IT people on staff to keep the business humming smoothly. But he’s had some bad experiences with the sort of IT people who give the field a bad name. He’s particularly ornery about the types that guarantee themselves job security by creating systems so complex only they can understand them. Then, once the software is created, they spend all their energy fighting efforts to simplify and streamline those systems, Roy says.

So what did Roy do? “I fired every last one of them.” He has since hired replacements, but with the clear understanding that their job is to support the business rather than their build their own technological empires.

Roy’s approach to IT shows the extent to which a new breed of technologies are giving more power to managers, sometimes at the expense of the programmers who once ruled the roost. Mark Smith, CEO of the IT research firm Ventana Research, says new tools that allow application assembly and configuration without coding make it possible for business people with only a modicum of technical knowledge to take direct control of their IT systems.

“Probably 80% of business applications are pretty straightforward, and you really shouldn’t be hiring Java developers just to move around data,” Smith says.

One way to avoid doing that is to take advantage of new hosted applications, like
Salesforce.com
or Zoho, for sales and customer service. These programs put a lot of emphasis on easy-to-use tools for customizing forms and databases. So although it’s possible to do some more heavy-duty programming to customize the software, often it’s not necessary.

Still, AWPRx’s business is complex, requiring the automated exchange of data with other applications and with other businesses, such as insurance companies and drug companies. That goes beyond what the likes of Salesforce can do on its own.

AWPRx has been able to manage a lot of the additional integration and customization with software from Jitterbit. That software is itself offered as a cloud service, for integrating different cloud applications with one another, or integrating cloud applications with a company’s internal systems.

Roy says much of the data integration work is being done by one of his partners, a clinical pharmacist who is not a programmer but who understands the business very well.

Sometimes “civilians” without computer experience have advantages over seasoned tech workers. For example, Roy said his old IT workers had a bad habit of assigning obscure code names to database tables and columns. Changing them to clear, descriptive names required a significant investment of time. “It’s been hell, but it’s been worth it,” Roy says.

The real issue is that some software programmers have a tendency to solve problems by writing code, even when all or most of the business requirements could be met with off-the-shelf software products. Then again, it’s also possible to make the opposite mistake, creating a Rube Goldberg kludge of packaged software that doesn’t quite add up to a coherent system.

So if you really have unique requirements, or you do not believe any of the standard software for your business addresses them properly, go ahead and write your own code. But if your technology staff is building an empire of servers and databases for no good reason, maybe you need to show them who is boss.